Frustrated by his rejection in the art world, a distraught
Warhol turned to Campbell’s Soup cans as a suitable subject for
his art. This had been at the suggestion of the gallery owner, Muriel
Latow, when Warhol lamented that ‘It’s too late for the cartoons.
I’ve got to do something that will have a lot of impact, that will
be different from Lichtenstein and Rosenquist’, two other artists
associated with the Pop Art movement in America. Warhol asked Latow what
subject he should choose (as he often did with friends and colleagues)
and she proposed that, along with money, Warhol should choose a subject
‘that everybody sees every day, that everybody recognises …
like a can of soup’.

In late 1961 Warhol began his images of Campbell’s Soup cans. As
with other images he made before, he projected enlarged soup can images
from photographs and then traced these in pencil onto the canvas. Warhol
gained instant notoriety and an offer of an exhibition in Los Angeles.
Warhol continued to develop this theme in his paintings and later in two
series of prints produced during 1968 that featured different soup flavours.